The present invention relates to a character input apparatus and method that uses a plurality of character input means, such as keyboard and voice input device, for word processing and for inputting Japanese and English characters. This invention also relates to a recording medium.
In general purpose computers such as personal computers and workstations, character input is made using a keyboard.
In recent years, it has become possible to enter handwritten characters using a mouse and to use voice for entering characters.
The character input procedure normally involves inputting characters representing the pronunciation such as in Japanese hiragana by a keyboard and converting the hiragana into Chinese kanji and, for kanji whose pronunciation is not known to the user, a handwritten character is used to enter that kanji. In this way, the character inputting is becoming easy for the user.
With the character input apparatus of this kind, however, when character input devices with different input methods, such as keyboard, voice input device and handwritten character input device, are used in combination, each input device needs to finalize the input character. For example, when a word xe2x80x9c(Tokyo)xe2x80x9d n a character string of xe2x80x9c(Tokyo station)xe2x80x9d is entered by a keyboard and a word xe2x80x9c(station)xe2x80x9d is entered by using a handwritten character input device, the user performs the following operation. First, the user enters xe2x80x9c(Tokyo)xe2x80x9d in Japanese hiragana from the keyboard and presses a kanji conversion key, which causes a plurality of possible kanji candidates to be displayed. Then the user selects xe2x80x9cxe2x80x9d to which he or she wants the entered hiragana to be converted.
Next, by using the handwritten character input device, the user enters a character pattern of xe2x80x9cxe2x80x9d with a mouse. In this case too, possible kanji candidates are displayed and the user selects a desired one.
With this kind of a character input apparatus, input characters conventionally are finalized by each of a keyboard, a handwritten character input device and a speech recognition device, and a string of the finalized characters is handed over to word processing software. Hence, when for example a particular character key on the keyboard should become unusable, the handwritten character input device cannot be used Instead of the character key. For example, in the case of xe2x80x9c(Tokyo Station)xe2x80x9d described above, when xe2x80x9c(denoted xe2x80x9cTOxe2x80x9dIn romanized alphabet)xe2x80x9d cannot be entered from the corresponding key and is entered from the handwritten character input device, the character input apparatus handles xe2x80x9cxe2x80x9d as a finalized character and cannot use it as an unfinalized character that can be converted into kanji.
When two or more character strings are entered through different character input means, final characters must be selected from among candidate converted characters for each input means, which makes the user operation complicated.